


It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

by Guede



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe, Ghosts, M/M, Mindfuck, Psychopaths In Love, Young Peter Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:25:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4657770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a ghost story.  It’s not straightforward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

Stiles hits the old Hale house just as the storm really tears open, leaden drops bulleting across the shaky porch in his wake. A gust catches under the eaves and pours down his back, slapping water through his hoodie and jeans exactly like someone tossing a bucket. He yelps, then shivers, half-turning to look irritably behind him.

The lawn is overgrown, not just with weeds but with juvenile bushes and the odd sapling. Some of the driveway has been hacked clear, probably because it’s impossible to see where that starts and the public road ends, but the dirt holds no impressions but a few animal tracks. The treeline crouches with grasping branches fingering into the intervening space, and then a high, hard wind screams about the house, and Stiles looks up and almost swears he sees the gables reaching back.

He shivers again and the porch creaks dangerously under his feet. The wood is softening, a little like mud, and he draws back, only to nearly put his other foot through a hole. He looks at the sky.

Lightning throws itself across the sky, blinding, vicious. Reeling back, white in his eyes, Stiles reluctantly turns and fumbles at the front door. There’s no way he’ll make it back through the preserve in time, and the storm doesn’t look like it’ll be a flash in the pan. He’s stuck here for the night.

The lock is rotting out of the door, and almost punches out before Stiles grabs it. He pulls it entirely through to the other side and winces, looking around. Then he shakes his head at himself and carefully nudges the door open.

He looks at a wide, high-flying staircase, grand old bones still strutting despite the fallen-in steps. Peeling wallpaper and water-stained, warped wood paneling. Gritty, damp dust clings to his shoes as he steps over the threshold, thick enough to feel close to a plush carpet underfoot. Half a blackened chandelier still sways overhead, metal and crystal adding a thin, eerie whine to the belated roar of thunder. Stiles edges sideways so he’s not under the chandelier, then remembers the door.

He startles when he sees it’s still open, just as he left it. Then he curses and lunges forward, grabbing it just as the wind sends it hurtling back around into the wall, fit to shatter. He catches the edge and drags it about, gets behind it and shoulders it into its frame. Then he slumps down, panting. A fresh blast of rain has caught him and his sleeve is dripping, his face feels chilled and flayed.

He wipes his arm over his cheek, breathing in deep, and then turns around. He needs to find somewhere to sit out the night.

Someone’s standing in the hallway.

Stiles blinks. The afterimage of the silhouette—tall as him, broad-shouldered, arms folded—flares across his mind, and the puffs of dust whistling down the empty hall do little to dispel it. He thinks of an old cartoon, a smug roadrunner leaving behind a chagrined coyote, and feels a tingle of bad humor warping his mood, pulling him out like the panels are twisting their nails from the walls.

“Hello?” he calls out. His voice drowns in another smash of thunder. He takes a few steps forward, across the arc of the chandelier, and reaches out to touch the staircase rail. “Hello?”

The wind shrieks through a window somewhere, making glass rattle and then break. Stiles jumps, spins around. He’s still alone.

He shakes himself again, firmly, and forces his body to slowly turn. He’ll pick a room, and he’ll find somewhere to sit in it, and he won’t move till it’s over. Maybe it won’t even be the whole night.

It’s a plan, anyway. He feels steadier. His brain’s still shooting out a thousand things a second but it’s not a million, and they’re clustering close around him instead of going into far-off, hideous tangents. He takes a deep breath, and takes his hand off the rail, and that’s when he sees the perfect, fresh handprint in the dust, just a few inches from his own.

Stiles yelps again, skittering back, and something buffets him from behind. It feels exactly like two palms smacking him on the shoulders. He stumbles forward, nearly crashes into the staircase, and then flings himself towards the front door. His shaking fingers scrape either side of the knob, then clutch around it. He scrabbles to keep upright, hissing when he thinks his foot is going through the floor, and finally manages to get his knees under him.

When he straightens up, he’s nose to the glass window set into the door. The outlines of his face greet him, blurry with foreshortening, and superimposed over them, two fiery blue eyes.

His hand twists around the knob and it comes out of the door. Stiles drops abruptly, off-balance, then slews himself frantically around. His heart sounds like it’s trying to hammer out his back, through his spine, and then, he thinks, it stops entirely.

He’s standing nose to nose with a man now. A blue-eyed man, with dark, curling hair on one side of his head, a strong jaw, a generous lower lip. And then, on the other side, a savage map of weeping sores and a scattering of stiff, brittle, reddish hairs that jut out between the roiled, charred flesh. There’s white under the eye and it’s the same white as the man’s teeth—white as _bone_ , cheekbone, and the man is smiling at him.

Stiles’ chest caves in on itself. His breath rushes out of him in a knee-dropping whoosh, and his weak body plasters itself to the door. The man leans in, still smiling, half his lips missing, and he—ripples. When Stiles’ breath hits him. He ripples, and his hair, the hair on his good side, it doesn’t move at all.

The man stops when Stiles lifts his hand. His smile tightens, becomes blank and fixed, and then flattens around a surprised inhale when Stiles pokes a finger right through his cheek. Stiles doesn’t feel a thing on his face except the drying rain, and the cold, scrabbling drafts.

“Oh,” Stiles says. “You’re a ghost.”

* * *

The boy’s relieved. _Relieved_. Peter is offended.

He should be, anyway. He’s good at scaring people. He was even before he died, even before it became _all_ he can do. The burns alone tend to send people screaming, but on occasion he’s been bored enough to play and has added two fatal heart attacks and a broken neck to his tally. He should kill the boy just for that.

The boy, babbling a mile a minute, is rummaging around in the old servants’ room, which Talia had been fitfully converting to a linen closet and a spare office. He’s going on about hypothermia and core body temperature and wedding monograms, and not making a bit of sense. His back is to Peter and there are at least three rotten spots in the floor here and the chair in the corner is heavy enough to break a limb if it falls on you.

But. Well. Peter’s bored, and they’ve already fallen out of the usual game. He comes over, hands clasped behind his back, and considers the boy’s find. Oh, he’s dragged up Grandmother’s old bridal trousseau. The fabric is stiff and yellow, and pieces break at the folds when the boy lifts it free from the heavy iron-plated chest.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” the boys says. He gingerly lays the dress back in the chest, and then picks up one of the fragments and holds it out to Peter.

Peter eyes it, then looks at the boy, who winces and drops it in the chest as if he expects to be smacked. “If you’re looking for something to dry off with,” Peter says, “You’d have better luck on the second floor.”

“The staircase looks like a feather falling on it would make the whole thing fall down. You sure you’re not just trying to make me trip through a hole?” the boy says. He’s already moved on to what he thinks is a box by the wall.

It was a box. Now it’s just a collection of ash, held together solely with inertia, till the boy’s prying hands introduce entropy to the mix. It disintegrates into a lumpy pile under the boy’s dismayed gaze.

“Whyever would I do something like that?” Peter says.

The boy looks at him, then looks at the ashes and, after that, back at Grandmother’s chest. He makes a face and stuffs his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. A burst of lightning filters through the cracks, limning his pale skin, touching his reddish hair with a blistering halo. He looks, for a moment, like something from a medieval prayer for the End of Days.

He looks like someone on fire.

Then the boy looks at him, eyes widening in surprise at whatever he sees. He reaches out, the shadows still curling around his outstretched hand like smoke, and Peter flinches. Then throws himself back into the wind that howls around the house, the wild, angry wail that twists perpetually over and over on itself, rending the clouds for blood.

* * *

The last remaining window-pane in the attic, where the people afterward hadn’t dared go with boards and nails for _safety_ , is shattered. Heaps of sodden, half-dissolved wallpaper mound up in the nursery, and three more floorboards curl up nail-toothed ends in Peter’s room.

No one alive is in the house, but Peter finds some table-cloths in the front parlor. They’re neatly folded and free of dust, but marked with light, recent stains here and there. He makes out the crook of an elbow on the top, and more amorphous shapes in the folds at the side of the pile.

“Hello?” comes the boy’s voice from the porch.

He’s wearing different clothes, flannel and khaki swaddling around the coltish jut of wrist and ankle and neck. He blinks hard when Peter appears, then offers a tentative wave.

The boy has a bag with him, which he sets down on the porch and then proceeds to empty out around the holes in the boards. Three binders, a notebook, and two textbooks. The notebook says _Scott McCall_ on the front.

“I’m Stiles,” the boy says, catching Peter. “Scott’s my buddy. I’m doctoring his chemistry homework while he’s at lacrosse practice.”

“Lacrosse,” Peter says. “Who plays that?”

Stiles makes a face at him and flips open one of the textbooks. “Beacon Hills is in the quarterfinals, actually. It’s a big deal now.”

“I preferred basketball,” Peter says.

“Yeah?” Stiles says, far too absently. He sticks the end of his pencil in his mouth, lightly chews it, and then snatches it out and looks mournful. Perhaps not his, either. “So…you’re a Hale, right?”

“Peter,” Peter says.

Stiles looks up. The pencil’s sneaked back into his mouth, dragging the lip under and sideways. Baby fat rounds his cheeks, smooths his forehead. In bright daylight he looks no more and no less a child.

“I, uh, read about what happened,” he says, blushing and graceless. His hand fumbles behind him, then draws a slip of paper from the bookbag. He turns it over so Peter can see. “I’m sorry.”

It’s a photocopy of a news article. There is a picture from a year before, of them all standing around Laura as she hefts some school trophy. They’re smiling, and Peter has his hand on Derek’s shoulder. Peter curls his fingers into his hips and wishes he still had flesh to bleed and hurt.

The paper is snatched back. Stiles hunches in on himself, limbs crumpling like the paper crumples in his hand. He scrubs at his jaw and leaves a smear of graphite and eraser crumbs. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—I just wanted to know what happened to the house.”

“That’s not what happened,” Peter says, almost unthinkingly. ‘Accident’ had been in the headline. He wishes he could still taste; his mouth should be full of bitterness and venom.

He’s angry. He’s hateful. He’s dead. The sun shines straight through him and leaves no shadow on the sagging porch, and the wind skirts two withered leaves straight through his feet. He’s powerless.

He does nothing, and watches curiosity unfold Stiles, one nervous, uncoordinated limb at a time. The boy looks at Peter like he can’t help it, like he sees a puzzle in Peter’s burns and feels his fingers itch with a solution, and deep, deep underground, deep amidst the charcoaled timbers and scattered bones, something stirs.

“What happened?” Stiles asks.

Peter sits. He puts his hand out, and a sheet of that chemistry homework blows from its precarious home in the binder pocket straight across his fingers. He watches Stiles chase it down, stumbling nearly into a splintered hole, and then stuff it away in the bookbag, and then he says: “I’ll tell you.”

* * *

Stiles brings history homework and more news clippings, the next time he returns. The articles say that someone thought a little, and asked the obvious questions, and then they either forgot or didn’t care or did care but didn’t care enough. Arson was considered and dropped, and no one now even remembers.

“A ‘wide-ranging interest in many subjects,’ and ‘an ambitious, driven individual’ who still ‘always held his family close,’” Stiles quotes from Peter’s obituary. He raises his brows over the clipping. “So, you were a loner and a nerd who only hung out with your relatives?”

“Hardly,” Peter says. “Family is family, you owe them your time regardless. I found the rest of the world generally wasn’t worth wasting the minutes on.”

Stiles laughs and ladders the piece of paper up and down between his fingers, playing it out like a fishing line. The sweat on his hands makes the paper soften and keep the shape of his fingertips. He stops at the end and frowns.

“It says you were survived by—”

“Yes, I know.” They had come back once, and hadn’t come closer than the treeline. Peter remembers. He was fresh then, with poor control. He had broken some glass things inside, and hadn’t made it out of the room he had died in before flying apart, and by the time he had coalesced again, they had gone. Sometimes he wonders about them.

Sometimes he wonders, if he tried hard enough, if he could find them.

Sometimes he wonders, if he tried hard enough, if he could hurt them.

They’re gone.

“You miss them?” Stiles asks. His face is concerned, and open wide as a new wound. He folds the article in half as if he could unwrite its words that way. “Bad question?”

Peter smiles at Stiles. “Do you miss yours?”

Stiles stiffens. “What?”

“When you’re here,” Peter says patiently. “Wallowing in the dead, chatting up a ghost, pretending it’s better. Do you miss your family, Stiles.”

A floorboard breaks under Stiles’ retreating foot. He goes half-in, leaves a drip of blood and a scrap of sock when he jerks free. Half his—this Scott’s—homework fans free from the binder jammed under his arm, and he curses and curses and grabs for it as he leaves.

It’s quiet after him. Peter stands on the porch for a while, then stoops and puts his hand through the broken board. He can see the blood but can’t feel it, can’t even remember the feel of it. He wonders, for a moment, if he really can feel anything.

* * *

What Peter remembers is how to count the passing days. He has no idea what month it is, save that it is in the fall because the leaves are turning, but he knows it is four days before Stiles returns.

“You’re an asshole,” Stiles says tightly, his bookbag clutched shield-like to his belly. He stands at the bottom of the steps and glares up at Peter. “I bet you were an asshole even when you were alive.”

“I was,” Peter says.

Stiles continues where he is. His glower transmutes into something more thoughtful, no less fervent. He throws himself into things, this boy, so full of thoughts and wants and so empty of caution.

“I don’t get why you couldn’t get out of the basement,” he finally says. His hand paws at the bag, absentminded, like a kitten kneading its mother’s belly. “I looked up a couple more things. They said most of you had burns like you moved around, like the smoke didn’t get you. And the basement door was open. Most of the frame held up, so it’s not like there was a lot of debris in the way.”

“Why didn’t you run?” Peter says. “When you saw me.”

Stiles knits his brow. “Because you’re a ghost? I—I don’t know, I guess that’s the postmodern teenager for you. Better have a ghost than a serial killer or a rapist, or some crazy meth addict willing to cut you up. I mean, I’m sure you can still hurt me, but I think there are rules about ghosts, right? Rules you have to follow, that a live person doesn’t.”

“I’m not a movie.” Peter sits down on the porch, over one of the holes. “I’m a werewolf.”

Stiles blinks rapidly. He hugs his bag closer to himself, but his body is inclined forward. His eyes narrow and he bobs his head, and then he swings his bag onto his back with an air of resignation, but takes the steps up two at a time. He comes so close that Peter can see the freckles on the backs of his hands.

“Can I see?” Stiles says, and then looks embarrassed. “Sorry. Can you…do you just look like this now?”

Peter sighs. He thinks of before, when the moon was high and the grass was thick and spongy under his hands, and the blood ran between his teeth. He thinks of his claws and his ears and his fur, of his bright eyes and his rumbling howl.

“Oh.” Stiles puts his hand out, through Peter’s forehead, and then pulls it back, wincing. “Oh, shit, sorry.”

“I don’t feel it, Stiles,” Peter says, amused. He’s amused because the memory of the shift is unexpectedly strong, is almost real enough to cling to, and he will not cling because he cannot learn to feel it slip away again.

Stiles laughs at him again. It’s a deprecating, knowing laugh, and Stiles makes a show of putting his hands in his pockets. “Hey. Hey, you look pretty nice like this.”

Peter tilts his head. The boy is different, but—and Peter puts his own hand up, even though he knows he can’t feel it. He frowns and moves his jaw, and he has no mirror, no feeling, but somehow he knows what he looks like, and he does not look like a werewolf.

He looks like himself, whole and unburnt, like the day before.

Peter— _flickers_ —dispersed and furious, concentrated and shocked, and then he’s as he always is. Now. As he is now.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says again. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I suppose not,” Peter finally says. He touches his face again, or where he thinks his face is. “It wasn’t you anyway. You didn’t do it.”

Stiles looks at him like Peter is strange and intriguing, and not scarred and wavering at all. “Okay,” he says.

* * *

“So there are _rules_ ,” Stiles says. He clasps his hands over the photocopies of the stolen police reports, rumpling them against his belly. His sleeves ride up, and Peter cannot hear like he used to but he can see the flutter-beat in one gangling wrist.

“There are,” Peter says. He settles himself on the porch rail, on the edge of what some power has declared the house. “Even now I can’t go very far.”

Stiles sits up. His elbow brushes his bag and a silky bit of nothing spills out of the top. “You can’t?” he says, looking at Peter, wide-eyed. “But it’s been long enough, the mountain ash has to have washed away. And even if not, how did it survive all the investigators—”

“It’s not the mountain ash that keeps me here now,” Peter says. He smiles, close-lipped, and watches the tiny tap-tap-tap of Stiles’ pulse. “I suppose it’d be more correct to say I _was_ a werewolf. Now, as you kindly pointed out, I’m a ghost. Different rules.”

“Huh.” Stiles scuffs one hand over the top of his head, frowning. He turns and his elbow knocks against his bag again, and he sees what’s fallen out of it.

He snatches it up, dull red suffusing his face and neck and ears. The boy blushes like someone is pumping blood into milk, creamy and soft. His heartbeat rises.

“Oh, yeah. Heh heh.” He fingers the scarf, his eyes furtive and lowered, and then folds it away into some pocket in his over-roomy clothing. “I, um, I was at a party and I kind of noticed she’d, this girl, well—”

“It’s all very well and good to play fetch for her, but I doubt she’ll find it so memorable,” Peter says. Not harshly, not mockingly, and still he has to wait out the first flash of anger. “If it’s really so irreplaceable, Stiles, and it doesn’t look like an heirloom to me, I’d wait a few days. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Yeah?” Stiles sits up. He’s of a height with Peter, or would be, if he always forgot his body and merely gathered himself in like this, like he means to see through to the end. “That’s what you’d do? Why do I get the feeling you did this a lot, when you were alive?”

“Make people thankful for my existence?” Peter says. Then he turns away. Gives Stiles his disfigured side. “Well, suppose I did. I can’t do anything like that now, not from here. Not after so much time. They’ve all forgotten, I expect. Buried in their own sordid little lives, obsessed with whatever good they stole out of it, and probably even believing the silly ghost stories about my family and me. Truth rots, Stiles, just as well as flesh.”

They are silent together on the porch. Inside, on an upper floor, a scab of plaster finally gives away under the assault of mold and damp, and falls with a deadened patter. Stiles starts, looks at Peter, and then shakes his head.

“You’re in a mood,” he observes, and then changes the subject to lacrosse, and his Scott’s travails with one Coach Finstock. He will do this, insist on bringing Peter the dribs and drags of teenage life, as if he could feed Peter back to life on such weak fuel.

Peter allows it. Stiles needs to speak about it, needs to regurgitate his fears and angers and desires somewhere, and for all that he cares for Scott and this nameless girl, they don’t seem to have the room. There is nothing but room in this house, even for petty high school troubles, and in the meantime Stiles’ pulse raps out a staccato against the thin skin of his wrist. He’s listening as much as he talks. And Peter _needs_ that.

* * *

Lydia, this girl is called. Lydia with the strawberry-blond hair and the jock bully boyfriend, Lydia with the secret smarts and even more secret bookish interests. Lydia with the ever-warring parents, who gave her armor and sharp weapons but, critically, no car. She finds her own transport, it’s expected, and if the boyfriend cannot then others always will, at their own cost.

“Worth it,” Stiles insists, laying the papers across the porch. “Worth it, worth it, don’t make that face at me. If Scott and I hadn’t ended up on the bus the day after, and our driver gone into delirium tremens ‘cause he couldn’t remember ol’ Scotty’s stop and missed his regular nip of whiskey, I never would’ve overheard him talking to himself and _you_ wouldn’t have a clue.”

The little fall breeze playing around them shivers and shakes the papers through Peter’s calves and feet. He watches Stiles pull them away and pin them down with pebbles. “A clue. He’s an alcoholic.”

“But it checks out with the insurance reports,” Stiles says. “The _first_ ones. And the guy who wrote them, _he’s_ the alcoholic bus driver, thank you, thank you.”

Stiles wears his pleasure thoughtlessly, gracelessly. He has eyes only for his _clue_ and not at all for Peter, who has turned over and over for years everything he could remember, everything he had known, looking for the mistake they had made. The viper they had taken into their bosom. And who had then pushed it aside, not quite given up on it but had forced it away, poison from a starving but not quite _dead_ man. He had battered and broken himself against the limits of his tether to this damnable house and had had nothing left to break but his sanity.

It’s a little bent, even now, but it serves. “Thank you,” he says, calmly.

Stiles looks up. His joy fades. He bites his lip, his eyes flicking this way and that over Peter, through Peter. He lifts his hand— _so easy_ , the solidity of it, the substance of it, with its simple shadow in the afternoon sun—and lets it hover near Peter’s face.

“Are you okay?” His mouth suddenly drops open, his eyes widen. “Oh, _shit_ , that’s not going to make you disappear, is it? Finding out you were right?”

“I knew I was right,” Peter says irritably, and then draws a breath he no longer needs. “I knew. It doesn’t really make a difference to have proof.”

“I know,” Stiles says. He looks down. Touches one paper and curls his fingertips back like it’s turned to mud on him. “Yeah, I know, it doesn’t…I’m sorry. I should’ve, I don’t know…I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Peter watches the way Stiles droops with downcast pride, the slumped shoulders, the fidgeting hands. “You know, I only wish that they knew. They knew what they’d done, really. It would have been Lydia’s eleventh birthday two days ago.”

Stiles lifts his head like someone roughly shoves under his chin. “You had a Lydia?”

“We had a Lydia,” Peter says, and stirs his hands among the motionless papers. “We had one, and I watched her die.”

* * *

It’s late, late into the night. Stiles never comes at night, not since the first time. He stumbles through the underbrush and up the steps, and knocks one swinging arm through Peter’s middle as he nearly goes into the house. The front door groans away from him, and then he turns and he sees.

He’s white and bloodless, and his hands are shaking. His eyes are so darkly shadowed that they look like black pits, but his mouth is red and quivering, like an overripe fruit burst open.

“Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit. Peter—I—I just went to talk and—Peter. Peter.”

“Stiles,” Peter says softly, steadily. He holds his hands, which can do nothing anyway, where Stiles can see them, palms curved like he wishes to wrap them around Stiles’ jerky, jittering shoulders. “Stiles. What’s wrong?”

The boy stills. He lifts his head and the moonlight slants directly onto his face, washing it bare. He’s a graven statue.

“The bus driver,” he says. “Peter, he’s dead, and I killed him.”

* * *

“A heart attack,” Peter says, yet again. “That’s nothing. I felt my eyelids melt off my face.”

“Gross,” Stiles says, half-heartedly thumping the floor.

They sit in the front parlor, Peter with his back to the wall, Stiles nested in the table-cloths he’d found before. The stiff brush of his hair might rustle Peter’s hip, if they were both flesh and bone. He keeps putting his hand out and waving it in and out of Peter’s knee, and Peter feels nothing so he sees no reason to move.

“He said he was sorry,” Stiles says. He pauses for Peter’s snort. “Said there were two guys with the girl, too. Big guys, to threaten him if he didn’t take the money.”

“How comforting for him,” Peter says. “Such a hardship, living on.”

Stiles rubs his fingers against the floor, making furrows in the layers of dust. His hand almost fills Peter’s knee. Peter looks back along the length of him and for a moment it seems like Stiles is coiled beside him, not sprawled.

“He said the one guy had a tattoo. It sounds like a bum the police questioned. I’m gonna check the reports again.” Stiles rolls onto his back, and the top of his head slides into Peter’s thigh. His chin juts and his eyes are narrowed against the bitter wind of disappointment. “If he’s got any kind of record, he’ll be easy to track.”

Peter raises his brows. “And you’ll be tracking him to what, be his confessor too? How convenient for them. All these years and they haven’t thought twice about it, and here you are, to take away the guilt anyway.”

“I’m not stupid. I don’t think they’ll all be sorry,” Stiles says, unexpectedly sharp. He glowers at Peter, then rolls back onto his side. His hands rattle against the old boards. He grimaces, tucks his arms in, but refuses to rub the bruises blossoming on his wrists. “Well, I’m gonna see. Maybe one of them knows who this blonde chick is.”

“They might,” Peter says. He already has a suspicion, but he doesn’t wish to share it yet. Not for fear of frightening the boy, or even out of a sense of timing; he simply wants it to belong to him, and only him, just for a little while longer.

Rage rises quick, dies as quickly. If he had known this before, he has had it carved into whatever passes for his substance these days. It’s not sustainable. Hate, on the other hand. Hate is stealthy, and sturdy, and stronger. But hate must be tended carefully, planted deep and nourished quietly.

“What do you keep drawing?” Stiles asks.

Peter looks down. Stiles has his hand in Peter’s hand, his fingers gloved in Peter’s fingers, and together they are tracing spiral after spiral on the floor.

“What if they’re not sorry?” Peter says. “What if they’re not sorry at all? What if they don’t even remember?”

“Then somebody should make them,” Stiles says. He stops moving his fingers and presses their tips till they whiten. “You know, I think I’m not sorry he’s dead. The bus driver. I just—it was—I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“You will now, won’t you?” Peter lifts his hand and folds his fingers over his lap. He looks at Stiles. “You should expect it.”

Stiles frowns at Peter, and then he nods and gets up. “I’ll let you know.”

“Do,” Peter says, and smiles, lips closed so he looks better. “Please do.”

* * *

“Can you smell?” Stiles wants to know.

Peter shakes his head. He leans on the porch rail, while Stiles stands in the overgrown footpath and wrinkles his nose.

“I smell like piss and crappy beer,” Stiles mutters. He scrubs at a damp stain on his shirt, then sighs and swings up the steps. “So, guess who wasn’t sorry?”

“Is he still not sorry?” Peter asks idly.

“No, he’s dead,” Stiles says.

Peter looks at him. Stiles looks back, shoulders hunched, hand still pressed to his side. The skin under his eyes is dark and puffy, and his short hair has a greasy, unwashed sheen to it. His fingers are red and pruny, as if they’d been washed a thousand times over.

“It was really easy,” Stiles says after a moment. “I just dropped a roofie in his beer when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t think that would do it. I was going to follow him home, and—but he passed out in the men’s room. Choked on his own vomit, they said. I guess I put in too much.”

“Well, do you make a habit of drugging people?” When Stiles shakes his head, Peter shrugs and turns his hand over, palm-up. “Then I don’t see how you can blamed for not knowing.”

Stiles shakes his head again. “You’re really kind of a nasty piece of work.”

“Speak for yourself,” Peter says.

“Hey. _Hey_.” Stiles jerks as if he’s been slapped. His cheeks flush, his eyes spark. “Hey, if you hadn’t told me your sad little story, I wouldn’t have.”

“Yes, let’s blame the dead man,” Peter says acidly.

Loose shutters bang shut on a windless day. The chandelier cries on its rusted mooring, and scatters broken crystals beneath it. Shadows fill the house, crowding out the sunlight.

“You’re so dramatic,” Stiles says after a moment. He takes a step sideways and forward, like a shy dog edging towards a half-closed hand, unsure whether it’ll be fist or friendly. “How far out can you go?”

Peter sighs, but he takes his arms off the rail. He goes down one, two, four steps. He should stop there, has always been stopped there, but for some reason he takes another step. Another. He’s staring at his own feet, as if he’s not known them all his life, and then he’s gone five out onto the lawn, five more than he has since he was alive, and he’s standing right in front of Stiles.

“Oh,” Stiles says, as if this is nothing. “That’s all?”

He flinches when Peter looks at him. Peter looks away, out at the treeline that is five steps closer. Something crawls up inside him—what he remembers as inside him—and twists so sharply that he thinks it _hurts_ , for a moment. Hurts, and not the memory of it.

“It’s just, well, these two guys. That were there. I found out they like to drink in the preserve, and there’s a hobo camping spot near here I bet they go to,” Stiles says in apology. “I was wondering if you could go see.”

“I wish I could,” Peter says honestly.

Stiles makes a soft, sympathetic sound. He fidgets with his sleeves. His arms are still clamped tight to his body, and as he moves they pull up the hem of his shirt. There’s a dark mark on his side, irregular at the edges, with a halo of smaller, lighter marks around it.

“Helping Scott with lacrosse,” Stiles says, too quickly. Then he shrugs. “Okay, so dive bars aren’t my natural environment.”

“Don’t get a gun,” Peter says slowly. “You’ll probably shoot yourself anyway, and they can track those.”

“Yes, I know, very familiar with the sheriff’s office,” Stiles says dryly. “Also, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Peter shrugs. “You’re creative, Stiles. No need to follow your friend’s example, and throw your body in harm’s way simply for the glory.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days,” Stiles says. “Well, I’ll think about it. See you, Peter.”

The woods swallow him up soon enough, but Peter stays on the lawn and looks at those remaining steps. It _does_ hurt, Peter thinks, and in that second he thinks he also feels the coolness of the air around him.

* * *

Peter walks out a spiral that encompasses the whole house. He starts in the basement, in the cinders where the body fat ran and the bones cracked under the heat, and works his way outward and upward, till he finds himself on the corner of one gable. He still passes through the walls. He’s still dead.

His hands ache. He flexes them, standing on the roof, and thinks he hears the phantom joints grind and pop. The full moon is a few days away, and every now and then he feels an icy flush, her long cold fingers teasing at him for the first time in six years. He’s tried everything, he thinks. Everything, but you need a body, and the fire had been too hot, too long. There hadn’t been enough left.

You need a body. 

He sits on the roof and thinks of Stiles’ and his fingers overlapping in the spiral. Of Stiles’ hand tipping a powder, or maybe a packet of liquid, into a man’s beer. Of Stiles gripping an old, cowardly man, shaking him and screaming, and then standing back as the man falls, puce-faced, dying. Of Stiles at the edge of a red circle, watching men’s shadows pass back and forth before the firelight, watching and waiting and ready.

 _They will all die_ , Peter thinks. Hatred is comfortable in his belly, a small but growing pit of warmth. He wraps his arms around himself, loosely, and cradles the dark, hot seed of it. His hands ache and he presses them in, closer to the heat. 

He sits and waits.

* * *

Peter waits for a week. Two. He goes down the steps and out his five steps, and then another five. Another five. He reaches the treeline. 

He stops there. Not because he has to, but because he doesn’t _know_. He doesn’t know where Stiles lives. He doesn’t know where to go.

A leaf whirls in the wind, brushes up against him. Passes partway through his leg, and then seems to stick. He pulls it free, and then holds it up and stares as it balances between his fingertip and thumb, till suddenly it slices free. He still doesn’t feel it.

Peter goes into town. He pauses on the edge, skulking near dumpsters and alleys till he’s satisfied that people will not see him unless he wishes them to. Then he steps boldly out onto the street, and heads up to the high school. It’s still where he left it, and is as good a place to start as any.

Many others are heading the same way. He slips in between them, careful to keep clear—they cannot see him but they’ve always been able to _sense_ him, the prickle on the back of your neck, the jump at the corner of your eye—and listens to their chatter. It’s a school night, a game night. Home game. Lacrosse. He still doesn’t understand it but he catches sight of a jersey and knotted gloves slung over a stick, and follows it to the locker-room.

Boys josh and muddle before him, laughing and sneering, slinging wet towels and slamming locker doors. They posture for each other, for the screams from the crowd outside. A wild-eyed man shouts from the middle, waving a clipboard.

Peter finds Scott McCall on the outskirts, glum-faced, holding his helmet in his hands and tamely waiting to take up the back of the parade. He waits with the boy, watching the tension crawl up his back, and then steps out just as the last of the others disappears through the door, as it’s only him and Scott.

The boy freezes, his hand on the door. He looks side to side, then shivers. His head slowly begins to turn.

“You’re lucky you’re dead,” Stiles says from Peter’s elbow. “Otherwise man, you’d be in so much trouble right now.”

Peter stiffens. Scott whirls around, then gapes at them. He bats his eyelids like a cartoon character, clicking up and down over round, wide eyes. “Stiles?” he says uncertainly.

“Hey, hey, go out there before Finstock gives away your spot on the bench again. I’m fine,” Stiles says. He waves his hand. When Scott doesn’t move, he sighs and gestures towards Peter. “This is Peter. Say hi, Peter.”

“ _That’s_ Peter?” Scott says. He frowns. Then his head whips like a beaten dog, heeling to someone’s shout from outside. He glances at them again, then goes outside, muttering at Stiles to be careful.

“You look weird like this.” Stiles grimaces. “Well, I mean, maybe not weird, it’s kind of interesting to see you’re actually not stuck like that, but…I can see Scott’s point.”

Peter looks at him. Stiles is dressed as he always is, clothes like a wrinkled envelope two sizes too big. His hands are shoved into his pockets, and he’s drawn the strings on his hoodie’s neck so it snugs up towards his chin. In the pitiless fluorescents of the locker room, anyone would look undercooked and ill-shaped, but there’s something permanent about the hollows etching away the baby fat of his face. “I thought it’d attract less attention if someone saw me.”

“I guess I see the merit in theory, but in person, man, you looked skeevy even in high school, huh.” Stiles crooks his elbow and bumps Peter, as if they’re classmates, and then goes still.

He’s bumped Peter. “Yes,” Peter says. “I think I’m changing.”

* * *

“I think this is throwing me kind of a lot,” Stiles says. He paces around between the rows of cars, then flinches as the crowd roars from the field. Then he sits back down on a car bumper. “Sorry, I know it’s kind of shallow. I just—I’m _used_ to you. The other you.”

“Used to me. Used to the monster?” Peter says.

Stiles folds his arms over his chest. “Are you going to go on some weird ego trip if I say yes, and threaten to kill me for defanging you? Because that’s not what I meant. And you’re sure as hell not defanged.”

“No, those seem to be coming back as well.” Peter arches his fingers and studies the claw tips that show ever so briefly. Then he puts his hand down. He steps forward and raises his hands.

Stiles flinches again, then draws himself up straight and angry on the car bumper. He lets Peter pull at the strings of his hoodie. They loosen an inch, then drop limply through Peter’s hands. Peter curses, and is surprised at the vehemence of it.

“Watch it,” Stiles says. He pushes at Peter and for that second Peter is solid enough for it. Then he tugs the hoodie back tight around his neck. “Don’t fucking scratch me up even more, it was bad enough when Scott saw.”

“I want to see,” Peter says, calmly enough.

“They’re dead,” Stiles says, more calmly. His fingers twist and untwist together. Out of his pockets Peter can see the scrape on one of them, the broken nails on the other. There’s a second scrape that goes up Stiles’ cuff, so deep and raw that for a moment Peter takes it for a burn. Then Stiles shoves his hands into his pockets. Pushes his head forward, low and aggressive. “Yeah, it got a little messy. I’m a kid, not an assassin. Scott freaked out all night.”

Peter pulls his hands back. “You told him? What did you tell him?”

Stiles slouches against the bumper. He hunches over and the neck of his hoodie loosens, and a shadow seems to sling itself around his throat like a rope. Then he shakes his head, hunching up even more, and the dim light skates over his ashen skin. “Hey, look, it’s getting _done_ , isn’t it? Shouldn’t you just be good with that?”

“It’s not your family, it’s not your dead, it’s not your revenge,” Peter snaps. “What did you tell him.”

Stiles is silent. Peter stands over him, anger making him substantial—substantial enough, perhaps, and he feels his claws prick and his teeth lengthen and his skin shiver against the shift. He wants to.

He wants to see. There’s something he’s missing, something _Stiles_ is missing, something in the way Stiles looks reduced and thin against the bulk of the car. It’s not right. They’re dead and at Stiles’ hands and this boy is Peter’s hands, is his hate against the world, and yet he doesn’t fit.

Peter walks away. Goes the length of three cars. The unknowing crowd screams and bleats happiness. 

He comes back, slowly, sidelong, giving his flank to Stiles. The boy leans on the bumper and watches him with tight, tense jerks of fists hidden in pockets. Peter circles up to stand before him, and then gets down on one knee. His skin twitches and it stings a little, where it splits into scars. Then it stings again, when the scars peel back and the burns dry up and the hair grows in.

Stiles smiles. A little smile, with his lips pressed together, his jaw still clenched. “You look better.”

“Do I?” Peter says. He reaches up and feels his smooth cheek. “If I walked back into there like this, I’d be arrested, not just in trouble.”

“Yeah, well, you’re _not_ going back in there.” Stiles tilts his head. “Right? Because ugh, please, I’m not killing these guys for you to be a pervy pedo voyeur.”

“Stiles,” Peter says. “What did you tell him.”

“Just…you know, that he needs to help me,” Stiles says, turning away. The parking lights are little kinder, stripping the life from him till he looks a corpse. “He’ll be okay, don’t worry about it. I know him.

Peter stands. “He doesn’t _have_ to, Stiles. I’m going to help you now.”

Stiles looks back at him. The turn takes his face out of the light and the shadows fill him out again, give him sweet curves of the cheek and lip. “Yeah?” he breathes.

“Oh, yes,” Peter says.

* * *

The last one in town is the chemistry teacher. He spins them a mean, desperate little tale about a lonely, bitter man and a pretty young woman in a bar, and draws them a picture. He’s a poor artist, but it serves its purpose.

Peter holds his hands under the running blood, and here and there he can feel the heat of it leeching into him. He smiles and paints a spiral next to the body. It’s a ragged, broken little thing, unconnected dashes where his fingers faded to nothing, but he’s patient and ekes it out, inch by inch.

When he’s done he sits back and lets his head hang with every breath. He’s tired. He’s _tired_. His blood is singing and his fingers and arms and back ache, and he almost feels like he needs sleep, needs to wrap himself away in some cool dark place, where it’s not so much so soon.

He sits, and soaks in it. Stiles sits against the wall, catching his own breath. It’s so jagged, Peter thinks, and then he means to look over but he sees the body again and he can’t look away, it’s so beautiful. It’s been so long.

* * *

They wait at the house. It will take a while for the news to reach certain ears, for conclusions to be drawn and decisions to be made, and they have preparations of their own to make. Peter wishes for death, not for oblivion, and he will not be so foolish as his nephew, as the rest of his family. He knows the Argents for what they are: things that kill if you don’t kill, things that walk in the dark for the kill as much as any werewolf.

He’s stronger, almost flesh some days, but still not quite whole. He admits he cannot be counted upon to rip out a throat. His hands are not ready, and Stiles is unwell.

There’s nothing visible. The injuries from the two bums, whatever they were, have long since healed, or should have healed. But Stiles is gaunt and growing gaunter, his clothes more cushion than camouflage. He moves slowly and gingerly, unmarked limbs extending with carefully-measured precision. When asked he mutters about Scott and lacrosse, and when Scott is threatened, he shouts that fine, he’s got a rare wasting disease, leukemia of the many syllables, how about that?

He does not have a rare wasting disease. He comes back and complains about lack of sleep, staying up and running Peter’s errands. The circles under his eyes do not improve with naps in the front parlor, on moth-eaten pillows Peter has patiently nudged down from the attic, but Peter keeps his peace for now. Stiles looks even thinner after one of their arguments, papery and light, and once Peter almost thinks he sees the edges of the boy flutter in the wind.

What they’re doing has a price. Peter has seen Stiles’ intelligence at work and he won’t demean the boy by asking whether Stiles knows that. He’ll watch and ask after silly things like history grades and mandatory grief counseling at the high school, so Stiles stays long enough that he might as well bring his dinner with him, where Peter can see that he eats. 

He’ll wait, and when they’re done, he’ll take care of it. Stiles will keep; it is a long, slow bleed, this price, and Stiles will be in very bad shape at the end of it, but he’ll pay and then Peter will make him a gift. The bite wipes the slate clean.

* * *

“Are you done after her?” Stiles asks one day. Artless, sprawled over the porch as in stronger days. He still toils over Scott’s homework, heaving his friend before him, like something precious and not deadweight. “Is she really it?”

“Yes,” Peter says. He doesn’t lie. What he will do after Kate Argent is dead, what he will need to arrange, that has nothing to do with revenge and everything to do with what he wants with his renewed life. What he thinks has been earned, one way or the other. “She’s the last.”

Stiles turns over and looks at him. It’s a strange, strange look, too…calm, and even as Peter thinks it, he knows that is not the right word. He feels his hackles rise and is not distracted by the sudden return of such a sensation.

“You’re sure,” Stiles says.

Peter returns the look as best he can. He’s already spoken, and anyway, he sees that words will not do here.

“Well, okay,” Stiles says, and grimaces as he rolls back onto his belly. He absently rubs one hand over his neck and the marks linger, blotchy red on his wan skin, but he’s all gawky angles again, uncertain under his bravado. “Just wondering, since, y’know, according to you we’re taking on a whole famous family and all. I’m even turning down winter formal with Lydia for it. So it’d be a waste if I put all this work into you and you go off and get yourself killed in a new blood feud.”

“I can promise you that that is not in my plans, Stiles,” Peter says. “Although I’m touched by your concern. I do believe you’ve come to like me.”

Stiles laughs and buries his head in the textbook. “I’m gonna remember you said that,” he says.

* * *

It is tricky, maneuvering an alpha to be in the vicinity at the same time as Kate Argent’s return, but not insurmountable. Vendettas are rare in this time, attracting too much attention when no wild frontiers exist to swallow up fugitives and too many dissection-minded groups might be interested in a source of super-strength and speed. And there are always self-appointed guardians of the community, coming to put down their foot and grind the heel, for the good of all.

In the end, it’s no one Peter knows. The alpha is very young, perhaps hustled out when too many were born into one pack. He follows the signs that Peter and Stiles have planted like someone has tacked his nose to them, and has a nasty run-in with an arriving Kate. Too nasty, too young—he almost dies, too early. Peter grinds his teeth from the roof and frets until Stiles arrives.

Kate Argent lies bleeding at Peter’s feet. His claws are still warm from the alpha’s throat, and as he stands and stretches into the wind, he _feels_ its affectionate ruffle through his hair, its lick at the back of his neck. He smiles, and across Kate’s body, Stiles smiles back.

“Give me your hand,” Peter says.

Stiles is still, fixed like someone has pinned him to a mounting board. He looks at Peter and he is so whittled down that the light seems to cut itself on him, falling into ragged shadows at his feet. “Peter,” he says, warning, but he holds out his arm.

Peter takes it and if he were a better man, a different man, he might ask first. Even if Kate had even been a little more savvy, but she had fallen so easily and then Peter’s real, solid claws had gone in and out of the alpha’s throat in a flash, so quick Peter barely felt it till the failing heartbeat had suddenly pounded in his ears, the night air had filled with a thousand scents. Till he’d been _alive_ again, alive and whole, and now he wraps his fingers around Stiles’ wrist and he can feel it, feel its warmth and softness, feel someone _else_ for the first time in too long and he’s too drunk on it to ask.

He bites down, still smiling. 

Something floods his mouth, cold and sticky, like wet ashes. He gags and it drips down his chin, coats his lips.

Peter stumbles back. He raises his hand to his mouth, then lowers it and what covers his fingers is thick and dark. It smells stale, old, like something so rotted that it no longer reeks, no longer has enough life in it to have any scent. He looks up.

“I’m sorry.” Stiles still has his arm out. Flaps of skin hang from his wrist, leathery and worn. He has a little more of the dark stuff smeared on his hand, but it’s clumped there, not flowing, like it’s gone turgid in his veins. And—and—

—and Peter _can_ see through him. He’s so thin now, like tissue paper, but layers of it. Layers and layers, peeling through in places so Peter can see through them. A rope-burn on his neck, more on his wrists. The heel of an old-fashioned shoe, crude and wooden, tacked onto the familiar sneaker. The skin flakes on Stiles’ arm, on his belly where his shirt is unraveling, through older and older eras to plain flesh beneath. Burned flesh, black and charred.

“I’m really sorry,” Stiles says. He steps forward.

Peter’s eyes fall to Kate Argent, unconscious, slumped, heartbeat just slowing to the end. Then he jerks them back up to Stiles. He understands then. Not the price he’d thought, not the bargain he’d assumed. Because it’s not Peter’s vengeance that Stiles is paying for, not his deaths that Stiles has been seeking. And Kate—

—taken everything from him, everything, she can die a thousand times and it still won’t begin to repay the debt, but her death, even her death will rob him because it will take this _boy_ , take Stiles with it, and—

“We’ve got rules too.” Stiles cups his hands around Peter’s face. He looks almost gentle, in the fragments of him that still have flesh enough to move. “And I’ve been doing this for a very, very long time, waiting to pay off my sins, waiting for someone like you. Someone who needed it just as much as me, when my family died.”

—Peter wants, _wants_ him, breathes him, sees him, feels him, has all of this come back to him only just now, only just for long enough that he can feel himself drown in it, and—

“You said you’d be okay. You promised,” Stiles says, almost lightly. He smiles, and behind them Kate Argent chokes a last time. “I like you, Peter. Let me help you.”

He pulls them together, just as Peter makes to push by him, and he kisses Peter. His fingers press viciously into the side of Peter’s jaw, searing like a brand, and his mouth tastes hot and sweet and alive.

And then he’s gone. Peter stands with two bodies at his feet, his own heartbeat hammering louder and louder in his ears until he sinks down to his knees. He covers his ears and closes his eyes, and all he smells is the sour, rank scent of loneliness.

* * *

“Well, what, are you going to just stay here?” Laura demands. She paces back and forth across the lawn. “Peter, we don’t know when the Argents might be coming, but they will be. You can’t stay. They’ll come after you and kill you.”

“You can come with us,” Derek says. He makes desperate eyes at Peter from behind Laura, as he’s been doing since the two of them staggered up the path to find Peter sitting on the house’s front steps. He’s so concerned, Peter’s little nephew, so afraid. “Come on. We don’t need this town.”

Peter props his elbow on his knee, and his chin on his hand. “No, you made that clear enough.”

They both stare at him. “You were _dead_ ,” Laura says. “There wasn’t—there wasn’t even enough to bury. My God, do you know how—we had a closed casket and—do you know how it’s been? How awful it was?”

“I know that Kate Argent had a lovely extra six years of her life, along with the rest of her little band of conspirators,” Peter says. He looks at Derek, who blanches and begins to mouth something, and then at Laura. “I know that I no longer have any reason to answer to you, Laura, and I know that it’s just as well since I don’t want to bother making nice to the person who started all of this.”

Laura’s eyes redden, and she crooks her fingers. “ _Kate_ started it, she did, she went after Derek and he wasn’t old enough, and you know it. You just want a fucking scapegoat. You always did, and I bet if you’d lived we’d still be having this conversation. If you’d lived and we’d stayed and we’d killed them all, you’d still find a way to be unhappy. All you want to do is _kill_. Well, sometimes, uncle, you’ve got to figure out how to live instead.”

Then she and Derek are crouched back, claws spread, snarling, and Peter realizes he’s stormed to his feet. He doesn’t care. “You _weren’t_ with me!” he shouts. “You don’t know—”

“You were gone and we weren’t, and now that you’re not you won’t give us a ch—”

Laura stiffens, her face spasming, and then falls over. Derek whirls around, only to fall victim to the same fate. Peter finds himself standing before his unconscious niece, claws and fangs bared. He wonders a little at it, but angry as he is, hurtful as her words were, they are his family. His blood, _his_ to throw away, and he’s not quite done with them.

He finds himself staring down a boy with a heavy, old-looking book, and a girl with two stun-guns, freshly reloaded. The boy is Scott, he remembers, and the strawberry-blond hair must make this Lydia.

“We’re going to bring Stiles back,” Scott says quickly, frantically. “It wasn’t—it’s not fair. He didn’t have a choice, when he said he’d do it, and we’re going to give him his life back. A _real_ life, the one he didn’t get to have before.”

“You’re Peter,” Lydia says. “He talked about you. We’ve got a body for him in the hospital morgue. We need werewolf blood, and we need it in the next six hours. Are you in or not?”

Scott grimaces. “We don’t want to—we’re not going to kill anyone. But Stiles is my best friend and this is our only shot. So—”

“I’m in,” Peter says. He grins, and rolls up his sleeve. “How much?”

**Author's Note:**

> Stiles' backstory, if anyone is interested: He and his family emigrated to California during the nineteenth century, and died horribly because his father was sheriff and got in the middle of some nasty outlaw shenanigans, trying to be a good man. I guess I'm imagining something like the opener of _Jonah Hex_ , where they burn up in the house. Stiles gets his revenge on his parents' killers but then is condemned to hang around till he can help someone in his same situation. He doesn't pass his job onto Peter or anything. In the meantime, he occasionally gets bored and makes "imaginary friends" with people, hence Scott and Lydia. Scott is obvious, while Lydia appreciates having someone to blow off with who's not part of any high school society stratum, and when Stiles wasn't dicking around with Peter, he was having fun corrupting Scott and Lydia to the supernatural side of things because hell, no, Stiles doesn't see the point of keeping them in the dark. Lydia has a library card and Scott has access to the morgue. Waste of resources.
> 
> Derek and Laura are okay, just electrocuted.
> 
> The title is because I'm feeling cheesy.
> 
> This story may also feel a bit familiar to anyone who's read East Asian ghost stories. I didn't have a specific one in mind, but I had their feel in mind.
> 
> If you think you spotted a William Blake reference in there, you'd be right.


End file.
